The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Ai is driving a rise in CEO impersonator scams. Deepfake CEO scams exploded to over 105,000 US attacks last year, with losses exceeding 200 million in Q1 of 2025 alone, including $125 million theft.

David Leary: [00:00:24] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] Hello and welcome back to The Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the accounting profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:37] I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:38] David WNBA news.

David Leary: [00:00:41] Wnba news. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:42] The, uh, it's our it's our favorite topic on the accounting podcast. I can't wait to discuss with you the week that the WNBA commissioner had the worst week of any CPA. Yeah, according to you. What? What happened? I'm not a I'm not a sports guy, I don't know.

David Leary: [00:00:56] So let's rewind a little bit on this. So the The WNBA in the last two years, year and a half has gained enormous popularity. A lot of it's due to Caitlin Clark's entrance into the WNBA that.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:08] I was aware.

David Leary: [00:01:09] Of. They have a new TV deal, and so this is like $2.2 billion, maybe a little bit more. And there's a current negotiation happening in the collective bargaining agreement. But the players are in general. So some of it is this public negotiation happening. But she got lit up by Napheesa Collier about her lack of leadership and to the point where just the players are basically asking her to get fired or to resign. And she had her own, um, her own press conference, and you could just feel how like overall tone and her, she's just out of touch with the labor to the point where she's made a sentence that said, like somebody on Twitter called her a lizard because she said, I'm human. I have kids. Like she's trying to be relatable. She actually said that in her press conference.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:57] Oh, no.

David Leary: [00:01:58] It's really. And then I'm stepping back and really looking at this and the way she's interacting with the lady, because that's what this is. This is management and labor relations.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:07] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:02:07] Yeah, yeah. She is a CPA. Spent her whole career at Deloitte. She was Deloitte's first female CEO 33 years. Like is that like the wrong management style to be having. It's there's something off here. And I think it's because of her background. She only worked in for Deloitte.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:26] 33 years at Deloitte rising up through the ranks in a traditional hierarchical business model that is more similar to like the military than to an entertainment organization, which is what these, um, what these leagues are these days. And they have stars, and the WNBA players are stars and are entertainers in addition to being incredible athletes. And you can't treat them the same way that you treat employees in your corporate hierarchy.

David Leary: [00:03:02] And she's not denying some things that have been said or the vibe of things have been said. She basically is rumored to have said that Caitlin Clark is lucky to have the WNBA platform so she.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:13] Can.

David Leary: [00:03:13] Make $16 million off the court. It's just that tone and I'm like, you're lucky to have this job. Entry level CPA, we just hired you out of college, I feel is I've not worked for big accounting, but you have. Is this like like, is this really the how, the how it's managed the tone this like, I'm better than you. You should be thankful for this.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:31] I don't know, like, to be honest. I mean, I worked for a large firm, but it was only, you know, large in the sense it was, um, it was a thousand staff and 100 partners. And, you know, the big four are just like, enormous, right? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees. So it doesn't it doesn't surprise me, though, based on what I've heard from people who do who have worked there.

David Leary: [00:03:58] So I she might not have a job this week. After the end of the week, she might get fired.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:03] You know, I remember when she got the job. And I always thought that, like, I remember thinking, it's kind of strange, like to go from Deloitte to WNBA.

David Leary: [00:04:11] She played college ball. So she has a background in basketball. Got it. Um, but I think I was trying to, like, digest this a little bit and, uh, like, the difference is, and if you think about, like, when you're the CEO of a public accounting firm, you're not really the decision maker, you're getting a lot of consensus. So all the decisions are made by a group of partners in a way. And now and so so you're not under pressure like it's not you. Right. Like, oh this is what the partners voted. Right. You don't. Yeah. But now like it's her. Like she's the one getting the finger pointed at. Right. She's the leader of this organization. Now, to be fair, all the major professional sports, all hate the commissioners. Like, that's just kind of the deal how it goes. But again, she's CPE and I'm just seeing like, her out of touch really come through. And I'm wondering if like this is a management issue of big. I could see a Big Four partner telling it some the labor. You're lucky to even have a job here.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:14] Exactly.

David Leary: [00:05:14] That's the tone she's putting out. And I've pulled up something about the control. Hold on a second.

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David Leary: [00:06:37] Yeah, I think the big thing is I think it firms the way you controlled people was through the culture, right? And now she doesn't get to do that. It's she has to negotiate with a union. It's a whole different game. Yeah, and Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:50] Completely different.

David Leary: [00:06:51] She's I think because she's, she hasn't been able to control the culture, which you can't do. And now the culture is revolting. Right. And she's looking like a deer in headlights.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:01] Yeah. Top down versus bottoms up.

David Leary: [00:07:03] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:04] All right. David. Um, I want to highlight someone I met at the advisory amplified tour. Listeners of the show know that I am, uh, I've been on tour the last few weeks. Where was I? Seattle, LA, Chicago and Austin on the advisory amplified tour. And next week? This week, I'm headed to, uh, Atlanta and Boston. So if you're going to be in Atlanta, well, probably this episode won't come out in time. But if you're going to be in Boston on Thursday, uh, come see us go to advisory amplified.com. When I was in Austin, I saw Logan Graf. He came to the he came to the event and showed up. So great to see Logan there. And then afterward he tweeted, uh, based on something about my presentation, which is, uh, it's about standardizing your tech stack. And one of my arguments is that firms should mandate a tech stack that's nothing like revolutionary these days, I think. Well, some with some firms it is. But most, most modern firms will now say, if you want to work with us, you need to use these apps that we use this general ledger, you know, this expense management tool, this payroll system. Um, that's that's sort of like a given. And I'm saying also that like we need to expand that to include banking, because banking is the primary source of data that goes into the accounting system. If you have clients that are working with crappy banks, it's just going to slow you down and you can't speed up your clothes. You can't get the data in accurately.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:38] Right. So that's my argument. And this is kind of controversial. So Logan tweeted. He said do any firms require their business clients to use a specific bank in order to work with them. This would be to provide accounting services inspired by @BlakeTOliver. And the response is, uh, ah, interesting. Here, I'll just read some of them ish. Dalal says. If you have hordes breaking down your door, sure filter them however you want. Otherwise, totally fair to charge a premium for those loyal to banks stuck in the Jurassic age. And there were quite a bit of respondents like people responding saying like, yes, um, I recommend certain banks and if they won't use it, I'm going to charge them extra like that's and that that to me is, first of all, I wonder, um, how could you charge enough to make it worth your time? You know what I mean? Like they're charging, what, 50 bucks extra or something like that? Um, but also, like, you still have to deal with the pain, right? It doesn't solve the problem. Here's another response. Ruvim said. I'm considering it. There are banks that are extremely difficult to work with. Not having check images is the big one. I would just let the client know their price is higher than usual because of the bank again saying I'll just charge you more if you use the wrong bank. Um, Richard says, I know one bookkeeper that requires a specific bank. She speaks about it a lot at conferences.

David Leary: [00:10:03] Josh, I know, I know who he's talking about. He's talking about Deborah Kilsheimer. Oh, okay. She makes everybody get on Chase. So she she does. She basically has built $1 million firm on the back of $170 a month charging landscapers, and she makes them get a Chase account so she doesn't have to mess with other banks. Chase was one of the first places that had a little bit of an accountants use case, right? You could sign a letter and get access or something.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:25] Well, it's just they made it easy to set up, read only access. Yeah. And then and give that to your bookkeeper or your accountant. And it was just the easiest to do. Like I that was my recommendation for a long time before I, before relay came along. Josh Youngblood says, I do not understand this take. Shouldn't that be up to the client? I can understand charging more if you have to deal with some horrible bank that makes it hard to get info you need. I can also understand having a list of banks you recommend but require. No. And there are so many people who respond saying like no, like I don't. Why would you ever require a specific bank? It's like there's this mindset that's like, this.

David Leary: [00:11:00] Is not the bank. The bank is to some extent a tech platform in a weird way. Right? It's just it's just what you stack apps, you're stacking the bank account. It's the same thing. If you're going to require apps for your clients, why not the bank account too, right.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:12] So yeah, exactly. And it's like, well, so are you going to take clients that are on like some, you know, let's say let's say that you have clients that come to you on wave and you don't do wave. You only do QuickBooks online or zero. And are you going to are you still going to take that client that's on wave and just charge them more money because they're on like wave? Or are you going to standardize and make them use your system? So there's a lot of like this, this, this, this mindset that is just so stuck in the mud when it comes to this. So anyway, thanks Logan for sharing your perspective and coming and, um, I don't know, sort of like continuing that conversation, I hope. I don't know, I just like, how do we get it through to the profession that if you actually want to scale up your firm, if you want to standardize your services, you have to mandate the technology. You can't let clients dictate what tools you use. Otherwise, they're just hiring you to do a job. In my opinion, and they should be hiring you to provide a solution and you get something done.

David Leary: [00:12:19] Go to them and logically explain. Here's why you don't want to use this bank anymore. You should switch to this bank. Yeah, and give them the reasons why. Like I get it. If you can't explain that to your client, you can't ask them to change. You have to be able to justify it.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:34] All right. Um.

David Leary: [00:12:38] David, Twitter thread similar to that, I guess. Um, Sadie Richardson CPE. So she tweeted and I'll read her tweet. Just had a client drop off his 2024 info today. And when I told him I was, it was cutting it close because this is October 1st and I'm leaving for vacation on October 10th. He looked at me dead in the face and told me that was bad planning. No sir. You bring your info on October 1st after our deadline is bad planning and I see this and I'm like, this is the accounting problem. Ai is never going to solve, Blake, because we can argue that AI is going to increase capacity at the firm and all these things. And then if a if a product actually solves this problem, you wouldn't even need an accountant or tax pro, like your taxes would just be being done magically to some extent. And in my opinion, the reality of the bottleneck is not the data entry at the firm. The bottleneck is the 25 places a small business owner or a client needs to go to gather up all these docs, save them to the hard drive, take photos with your phone, and then get them to you somehow. That's the bottleneck. And so what happens is people like me and and I get it. Clients. I'm just going to procrastinate. I don't want to do that stuff. It's the worst. Like that's and automation is never going to solve that problem. You can build as much capacity in your firm you want, but people are still going to bring stuff in late at the last minute. And yeah, you're going faster to do it doesn't really solve the problem. Ai is never going to solve this problem.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:04] Well, I don't know about that. Maybe maybe there's one way it could. This is really similar to what I was just talking about. Like in my presentation with the with the data in issue. Right. You need you can't do your job as a tax preparer unless you have all the data you need. And that's you're relying on the client to get you that, um, same way with like if you let them choose the bank, you end up relying on the bank to get you that data and it slows you down. Right. So, you know, what's the solution to this is I don't know, I mean, the AI agents that can go out and log in on your behalf to different systems and go and gather information. They are coming. But the big barrier is the trust. Like I'm not. Are we really going to give like our password manager access to and banking access and all this like really sensitive information? Are we going to let an AI agent, like, log in as us and go grab that information?

David Leary: [00:15:00] Well, that's assuming all the places these docs are have logins for accountants. Usually they don't. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:05] Well no I'm saying like I as the as the business owner I as the client. Yeah. Like that's the solution is that I need an AI assistant that goes out and gathers all the documents that my accountant is requesting. Yeah. And once I have those, then I can, like, easily dump them in, like. And the solution for the like, the solution for the sending the files to the client is like, we need a solution where it's just like, go to some web page or open an app and just dump everything in. I don't want to have to like organize it for you.

David Leary: [00:15:33] Those are starting to show up. You just drop it all into one folder. That's starting to show up, right? But just getting all that, getting inside the folder. Yeah, the drag and drop is easy. Okay. It's the getting it all.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:43] To go back to that tweet, though, the solution is that, um, you don't just have like a deadline in your firm like a single deadline. That's what a lot of firms have. They say, like, if you want your tax return done by the deadline, you have to get us everything by this date. And then clients are inevitably late. And that doesn't work because people miss deadlines.

David Leary: [00:16:06] You have to surge, price it. That's the only way to really do this.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:08] Surge price it. That's. Yeah, exactly. If there's like a financial incentive to get it done faster. It's like twice as expensive if you wait until the deadline or, or it just keeps going up every day, you know, until it's ten times more expensive, then you know, you'll be happy to do a rush return if you're making ten x what you would normally make right. It's like creating those incentives. And then also the other thing that I keep hearing about that just makes so much sense to me is this idea of scheduling returns. Turns. So instead of saying, you have to get us all your stuff and then now we work, you say we are going to work on your return on this day, and if you don't get us everything we need by this day, then you are going to get pushed out.

David Leary: [00:16:50] You're going to find a different account.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:52] Rescheduled? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then that manages your capacity. Because you know that this return is going to take four hours. The time is on the calendar. The client will call and be available during that time. Maybe they come in. I mean, it's like when you use, like, so many of these, uh, you know, uh, H&R block, you know, kind of places, you just go in and you sit there while your accountant does the return. Like, there's a reason that they do that. It works.

David Leary: [00:17:21] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:22] Right. Um. All right. Moving on. Uh, how about we thank our next sponsor, David? I believe that is cloud accountant staffing. In case you missed the last 100 or so episodes. David and I have been discussing almost weekly that there is an accountant labor shortage, regardless of the root cause. The problem is real. My social media feed is full of firms attempting to fill open positions on their teams, but how can anyone increase their staff size if everyone is attempting to hire during a labor shortage? That's where cloud accountant staffing comes in. They'll help you find full time team members for your firm that live in the Philippines. How much would your firm change? Or for that matter, your life? If you could add 40, 80, 120 hours of capacity to your firm in 2026? Cloud Accountant Staffing was founded by a firm owner who grew his firm using offshore talent, and now he's applying everything he learned to help you grow your firm. If your firm is in need of expert bookkeepers, accountants, CPAs or virtual assistants, head over to The Accounting Podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast. Now, David, I guess we should talk about the IRS shutdown.

David Leary: [00:18:32] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:33] I mean, government shut down October 1st, and the IRS put out a contingency plan saying that they're going to borrow funds from the Inflation Reduction Act to stay open for a grand, whopping five days after. So what was October 1st was Wednesday.

David Leary: [00:18:52] So you have two more days, maybe Wednesday.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:54] Thursday, Friday.

David Leary: [00:18:55] So you count.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:56] Yeah, two. Monday. Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. And then the IRS is going to shut down like a week before the October 15th deadline. I don't I mean, what else do you say. It's not going to be good. It's going to be bad.

David Leary: [00:19:11] Yeah. They're saying after day five expect slower refund processing, reduced phone and correspondence support and delays in audits and appeals. And they're advising tax pros to file your returns, make payments and pull transcripts now before systems go limited.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:25] I don't see how like this politically is good for Trump or the Republicans. I mean, it appeals to a certain segment of the base that wants the government to shut down and wants this chaos. But it doesn't appeal to moderates.

David Leary: [00:19:44] And it's very logical, because I think I saw that there was a threat there. Trump's like, we'll just shut it down permanently. Okay. So you're going to just not have the IRS anymore. Like how are we going to collect this money? It doesn't it just doesn't make a lot of sense. It's great soundbites. But this is not that good. If you're as a reminder, during the 2018 2019 shutdown, IRS mail backlogs reached five 5 million pieces, which wound up costing the government billions. Like so, shutting down the IRS actually winds up increasing costs because the the work's still going to be there in the end. It's not going away. So why should it down.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:21] All right. The AICPA, by the way, has renewed its call to exempt all IRS employees for the duration of the shutdown. Down. I believe that went unheard, fell upon deaf ears. So I don't know, with the shutdown going on, with the paralysis in D.C., with the impact of tariffs hitting and job growth slowing and things continuing to be uncertain, you wonder what's going to happen to the economy going into the end of the year and going into 2026? We have a bit of data from CFOs. Cfos are feeling weirdly optimistic. So 90% say that they're more confident about their own companies compared to three months ago. That's huge. That's a huge jump. It was just 48% last quarter. So 90% are more confident about their own companies. But they have like lukewarm confidence about the economy overall. So isn't that an interesting place to be in? And we see this sometimes with like personal, uh, finance where they survey consumers and consumers are very happy or generally happy with their own situation, but they worry about the economy.

David Leary: [00:21:45] So psychological or behavioral economic definition of that paradigm of whatever it is, where you think everybody else is going to be affected by the economy, except for my business or except for me. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:21:58] Oh, yeah. You think they're being overly optimistic? I don't know. I mean.

David Leary: [00:22:02] Everybody else's problem, like everybody else, is going to have an economic problem if the economy turns south. But I'm confident in our business.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:08] Yeah. I mean, I'm confident in our business, too. Like, I feel like it's a weird situation because we have all this new technology. We have everything that we could, all the stuff that we can build with. Ai editor Mark David is incredible. Like, we have just crazy unlimited opportunity if we just execute on our vision at the same time. We've got this like totally dysfunctional federal government, and we've got like a situation where, like, we might drive ourselves into a recession through tariffs and create more inflation. But at the same time, because things are getting bad now, the fed might start lowering interest rates, which will then stimulate economic growth. So I guess the answer is that there's just like a lot of opportunity but also a lot of chaos. It's just a very chaotic time.

David Leary: [00:23:00] Yeah that's that's a good, good summary. It's chaotic.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:04] All right. So David, should we get to, uh, app news or, uh, do you want to talk about the California New Jersey alternative pathway? Maybe we hit on that real quick.

David Leary: [00:23:12] That even faster than that. I'm going to touch quickly. The, uh, the cost to get a PTEN is now dropping again to $10. So it's going to be so it's dropping from $11 to $10. Plus there's a $8.8 $0.75 fee Feed that's paid to a third party contractor. So whoever's administrating this is getting almost 50% of the revenue.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:32] Wait, why are why is the PTEN price dropping? Pten deflation.

David Leary: [00:23:36] They review the cost of it. Okay. Biennial b I e n n I l is that every two years they review the cost.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:44] I guess.

David Leary: [00:23:45] Because biannual would be.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:47] Twice a.

David Leary: [00:23:48] Year. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:49] So I don't know, I always get mixed up by that.

David Leary: [00:23:50] Yeah. So they, so they review the cost and they've done this a couple of times these cycles. So basically the 900,000 professionals are going to renew. And but historically speaking if you go back it used to be in 2021 to 2024, the fee was about $19.75. And then um, prior at one time in in 2010, it was up to $64.25. And then in 2022 it was $30.75. So they did research. They realized they were overcharging this. And somebody on Twitter brought up a good point. What happened to the $50 million a year when they were charging so much for it? Like, like, where's this money? Like, what happened to this? This money? But I also feel like now that it's $10, is this just pointless? Like, is this just a way for a third party contractor to get some money? Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:41] If anyone can get a ten. That's the problem is there's no regulation of tax preparers essentially. Yeah. So it's just a it's what is it what what security does it give us.

David Leary: [00:24:51] But and what's for $10 in the grand scheme of like budgets and things for the IRS etc..

Blake Oliver: [00:24:56] Like I don't know.

David Leary: [00:24:57] Like what's $10. It's nothing.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:00] Oh the pizza. So we're talking about the I'm confused. We're talking about just like getting a getting an ID number. So you can like file a tax return.

David Leary: [00:25:09] File the paperwork, get your number returned to you, and you have to pay a fee of some sort, some sort of, um.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:15] Well, this is real breaking news, David. Like, this is just like you got some hot. Hot.

David Leary: [00:25:21] Well, it's only because on Twitter, like somebody brought up a point. Like what happened to all the money when they used to charge 60 bucks for a PTEN in the days?

Blake Oliver: [00:25:29] What happened to it?

David Leary: [00:25:30] It's like $50 million a year.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:32] Yeah. Okay.

David Leary: [00:25:34] But in the grand scheme, I mean, this is like, this is like $9 million. Like, why even charge people for this? It just doesn't make sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:42] Well, David, um, it'll just remain a mystery, I guess.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:46] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:46] In other news, um, AI is driving a rise in CEO impersonator scams. Deep fake CEO scams exploded to over 105,000 US attacks last year, with losses exceeding 200 million in Q1 of 2025 alone, including $125 million theft. Scammers are using AI to create convincing video meetings with fake executives, and they are exploiting human psychology through authority and urgency to trick employees into transferring funds or data. Companies like Ferrari, Wiz and WPP have been targeted. Financial institutions are particularly at risk. So this could happen to your organization. Um, and as we've talked about before, David. Right. What are the do you remember what the best way to defend against a deepfake AI attack is?

David Leary: [00:26:43] Well, to have a secret code word.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:45] You'd use with.

David Leary: [00:26:46] Your client or your family, and then you would try to have a live connection of some type. But even that's now. Yeah, you could hack around that. Yeah. Maybe physically meet. Hey, I'll change your payroll account number, but you have to physically meet me at this McDonald's first to talk it out.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:01] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:01] Multi-factor. A multi-factor authentication method. Right? Don't. So the way this usually works is the. The target of the attack gets a call from a fake from the fake CEO, gets on a zoom call for a follow up meeting, and then is instructed to say, do a wire transfer. And then the Treasury, whoever has access, right? The CFO, the whoever in Treasury does the transfer and it's too late to get the money back. So you got to have you got to have a you got to have another way of verifying. Right. You must text me. Right. Text, text the person you're on the on the call with.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:36] I usually like.

David Leary: [00:27:37] The, uh, message me through slack, some internal private messaging channel that nobody else should have access to. I think that's always good.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:44] Um.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:46] Um. Personal fraud story. This week, a family member of mine fell for a scam, and we've been reading about this, talking about this for years, David. Like, millions of Americans are victims. Individuals. Millions of individual Americans are victims of scams. Crypto scams. And, uh, it happened in my family.

David Leary: [00:28:12] How? I'm dying to know what? Somebody's pig butchered. Like what happened.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:16] Here?

Blake Oliver: [00:28:16] Well, no, because pig butchering, that's where, uh, isn't that where, like, you're on, like, like a dating site or something?

Blake Oliver: [00:28:22] No, it's like I.

David Leary: [00:28:23] Send you that text that says, hey, Joe, do you want to go golfing? Do you remember me? And then they started scamming. And it's a romance scam through text romance.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:32] You got.

David Leary: [00:28:32] To.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:32] Send.

David Leary: [00:28:32] Them crypto or buy crypto or something.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:34] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:35] No. So this was a, um. I don't know what you call this, but basically, my family member got a call, and it was. It was supposedly like the jury duty. Uh, it was the court or the police or something. And it was because she had not done her jury duty, and. The the way they got through to her is she had, um, gotten jury duty recently, so they must have had some sort of, like, record. They must have gotten into the court system to get the jury duty records. So she got exempted or. No, it was. It's that thing. And it's that thing where, like, you have to call in every day, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:29:20] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:20] And you call in, you call in to see if you get called. And a lot of the time you don't. So that was it. There was like got a jury duty notice, called in, didn't get called. Thought it was all over. Then later gets this phone call and it and it's the the police or some sort of authority saying you didn't show up for jury duty and you owe a fine. And if you want to get this resolved, you have to like pay it now. And created this sense of urgency and got her to, um, leave the house, go to an ATM, take out a bunch of money and convert it to crypto at a kiosk at a supermarket and send it all in a matter of a couple hours and kept her on the phone the whole time so that nobody could stop it from happening.

David Leary: [00:30:14] I think I saw those those coin me kiosks at the grocery stores in the state of Arizona. They're being banned. They're going away very soon.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:20] I mean, it's just money laundering, like right there at the grocery store.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:24] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:24] Take your cash, convert it into crypto. Like, are you kidding me? Like, they might as well call it that. It's just it's it's it's insane. Yeah. Enabling and enabling scams too. That's amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:37] Um, so.

David Leary: [00:30:38] What's the recourse? Is this money just gone now?

Blake Oliver: [00:30:41] Yeah. There's no way to get it back. Yeah. Um, 1500 bucks. So it could have been worse, right? But they keep it low, I think, when it's that kind of scam, because most people can't take that much money out of the bank via an ATM withdrawal.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:55] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:56] So they keep it low. But yeah. What's the recourse? It's sort of like education I think. But also like this happens a lot to the elderly and there's really not that much you can do I guess setting limits. Right. Like go and go, go with your relatives and um, like set withdrawal limits If they're going to manage their own money. Um, make sure that, like, I do this for myself, right? Like my ATM card. I can't withdraw, like, more than a few hundred bucks in cash because I don't like. Why would I ever do that? So maybe, you know, I do that just as a security measure. And maybe you do the same thing with, like, their online accounts.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:35] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:31:35] I mean, the other thing is like just every as as an elderly person, every interaction you get just assume it's a scammer. Every single phone call like I, my mother in law did this. Her her house is right next door to my office. I hear calls come in all day and they're all scams. Every phone call is a scam.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:53] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:53] It's crazy. It was a local number. Seemed trusted. Trusted, trustworthy. So I don't know if our listeners have any suggestions. Let us know. Um. I've got actually, like, a ton of fraud stories here. Did you hear about the Airbnb guest? Who said a host used AI generated images to make a false damages claim.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:20] Wow.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:21] This was an Airbnb super host, so they allegedly made AI generated photos to fabricate a $9,000 damage claim against a departing guest, and the guest disputed this. And initially, Airbnb approved the fraudulent claim and this guest was going to be on the hook for like $9,000. And then the guest went to the media. This is always how it happens, right? And then pointed out that the photos don't look right. There's like inconsistencies in the wood grain and the cracks in the wood. Apparently, you know, the damage that were inconsistent across multiple photos. So that's that that's how you can catch some of this stuff. There's multiple photos. It's not going to be totally consistent. And they.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:11] Proved it.

David Leary: [00:33:13] Until they work on that and they do just a plus 1 or -1 on these foot as they do the second versions.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:19] You know, what's crazy about this is Airbnb didn't cancel the Superhosts account. They just warned them.

David Leary: [00:33:25] Well, once your superhost like it's a pretty good gig.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:28] They're making money off of you, right? Yeah. Um, should we talk about the alternative path in California and New Jersey?

Blake Oliver: [00:33:36] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:37] What's the news there? I think it was Amber setter who alerted us of this.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:40] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:33:41] So the California is breaking news, but let's touch new Jersey really quickly. So, uh, a few days ago, new Jersey has introduced a bill, um, from new Jersey, new Jersey society of CPAs, that will essentially create an alternative path so you can get a bachelor's degree with two years of experience and pass the exam. It's the same what everybody else is currently having. So that is, um, it's passed the Assembly May 22nd, 2025. Um, and then the Senate Commerce Committee on June 12th, 2025, and they expect it to take effect January 1st, 2026. And the state of California recently pushed through their bill, AB 1175, to Governor Newsom's desk and breaking news as of was it yesterday.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:25] I don't know.

David Leary: [00:34:26] It was just signed like breaking news. It's only reported right now on the Cal CPAs website. I don't see it anywhere else in the news. So as of breaking news, California is officially signed in Alternative Pathways. And again, it's the same thing. Um, the way they frame their laws a little different, though, they're they're basically saying you must earn a bachelor's degree with an accounting concentration and pass the uniform CPA exam and complete two years of experience. But if you get a master's degree, you can substitute it out for one year of experience. So they're they're it's the same law, but they're just communicating. It flipped flopped and all the other places. Um, or you can get an approved accounting certificate program, but I'm not really sure what that is. Um, so yeah, Dad. Now we're at 26, 28 states now somewhere in there that have to have alternative pathways and they all have the same pathway. They're all it's amazing how they've I'm not gonna use their conspired together, but it's amazing. Barry Melanson leaves the leaves AICPA. And all these states introduce bills that are almost identical to each other, right? One after another.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:34] There was some.

David Leary: [00:35:35] Word.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:35] But there was some.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:36] Mastermind behind this. Who knows?

David Leary: [00:35:38] Yeah, it's not conspiracy. It's not colluding. Um, coordination. Maybe it's the right word. That's the polite way to say it.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:45] So the US News and World Report rankings are out for the top 12 undergraduate accounting programs for 2026. I don't know if anyone reads this anymore, but I know when I was going to college, like the US news rankings were important. Like did you when you when your kid was deciding on schools, David did you did you care about that?

Blake Oliver: [00:36:06] We didn't find anybody.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:08] No, no, I mean, you look online for the rankings, right? Like, here's the top 100 colleges, that sort of thing.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:13] Maybe, like.

David Leary: [00:36:15] You visit the website once you're really watching it. I mean, here's here's what people watch in Arizona. You have ASU up there by you. You have A's down here. It's the playboy's list of the top ten party schools. That's the list people pay attention to. And there's those two schools are always on there.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:29] Oh they are. Okay I didn't I wouldn't know. Well, here's the news about the accounting undergraduate program rankings. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has overtaken the University of Texas, Austin as the top undergraduate accounting program for 2026, moving up from second place last year. So good job. University of Illinois beat out University of Texas, Austin, Illinois. Accounting graduates earn an average starting salary of 78,477 and 96% secure employment or graduate school placement within six months six months. These rankings are determined through surveys of business school deans and senior faculty, evaluating classroom resources, graduation rates, student debt, and starting salaries. The top five programs are Illinois, Texas, Brigham Young, Indiana, and University of Pennsylvania. I can keep going, David, unless you've got something you want to talk about.

David Leary: [00:37:26] No, I was just trying to.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:28] You're deep in thought there.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:29] You're, like, processing schools.

David Leary: [00:37:31] And I was like, yeah, it makes sense because BYU always has that reputation. Right. So continue on to the next story.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:38] All right, so I got a giant list of stuff we can talk about. Let's talk about tech. Right? Yeah, a bunch of fundraising hot tech stories. Uh. Here's one. Oh. Uh, wait, have we thanked Bill, our next sponsor?

Blake Oliver: [00:37:51] Yes.

David Leary: [00:37:51] We should do our next sponsor.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:52] Let's thank Bill, because my next story is about Bill.

David Leary: [00:37:56] October is cybersecurity awareness Month. And this month, this October, bill is putting out the spotlight on payment fraud prevention. As listening to this podcast. I'm sure you know that cybersecurity isn't just a tech problem, it's a business risk. More than half of small businesses aren't confident in the security of their B2B payment systems. That's a huge opportunity for accountants to step in and lead. As an accountant, you're always you're often the first line of defense when it comes to protecting clients payments. Bill is the all in one financial operations platform built for accountants from AP and AR. Automation to spend and expense management bill helps firms streamline the back office bill helps you protect every payment with customizable rules and approval policies to ensure true separation of duties. And throughout the month of October, Bill is offering real, practical advice to help you protect your clients and their money. Learn about protecting payments with automation and AI from industry experts, including Danny Shimamoto and Laura Redmond. Register for Bill's free CPE webinar on October 8th. Head over to Accounting Today bill that is The Accounting Podcast forward slash bill.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:01] And Bill Ill in APT news has recently introduced the Bill Cash Account, an operating account that combines treasury and payables functions while offering a high, uh, I guess up to 3%. Maybe. Maybe it's more than that. But one of the examples is 3% APY on operating cash. I saw this and I thought, wow, they took a while to do that. Like I thought, I'm I'm surprised that they didn't already have that, because this is where all of the expense management apps seem to be going. They're all adding cash accounts. We saw you know, QuickBooks did it a while ago, a few years ago.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:37] Ramp has this.

David Leary: [00:39:38] I brought this up when I was at Melio because I would I people would pay me through Melio, and then I'd have to go to my bank account and then I'm basically paying people through Melio and then I have to go through my bank account. I'm like, it should just stay in Melio, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:39:52] Like Venmo, right? Yeah.

David Leary: [00:39:54] It makes sense for a balance to stay in the bill pay in and out system. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:59] Makes sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:59] So so now they've got that Um, I guess improvements include next day business. Ach, payments with no additional fees. Unlimited transactions, FDIC insurance, up to 200 million. So they must be doing that thing where they take your balances.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:15] Sweeping.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:16] Sweep it out to different, uh, different banks to keep that FDIC protection. So if you're if you're a bill customer, check out their new operating account feature. All right. I've also got more app news here. David, feel free to interrupt me if you want to if you want to highlight a story. But my next one is dual entry has celebrated a $90 million series A I. I hadn't heard of dual entry until I read this story, and maybe I'm just like out of touch or something, but it sounds like they were in stealth for a while or or something. Um, do you know about dual entry? Have you heard of them before?

Blake Oliver: [00:40:58] Not.

David Leary: [00:40:59] Not directly outside of the article of the res, or they're about to res or announcing of the res. Um, but they basically the history on it is the founders had their own company before and they rolled out an ERP system. And just like anybody who rolls out an ERP system, you get frustrated like, I'll just build one from scratch. And that's what they basically did. It's an AI based ERP ERP system.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:22] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:22] So they said that their ERP implementation for their previous startup took, uh, 18 months and cost 150 to $200,000 in consultants, plus $100,000 in licenses. I'm assuming that's like their annual fee. And that was at their company. Uh, Bennett. And the first implementation failed, so they had to switch consultants. And then the system ended up not being able to handle the transaction volume and lacked integrations. So classic case where startup founders hate accounting and decide with their next startup, they're going to fix it.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:57] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:41:58] They have an interesting goal. The way they present this is they want to basically help create finance departments that have a staff of one. Right. So that's their goal. So I'm a company small business owner. We have a one finance person. And our company could be doing $1 billion in revenue. But we still have a finance department of one person. It seems a little aggressive to me. But I like that that like that's a marching direction, right? It makes a lot.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:24] Of sense.

David Leary: [00:42:25] To go down that path.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:26] And they're using AI agents to do it. They say that AI is embedded in the architecture, multiple AI agents working in parallel throughout workflows. And an example is bank reconciliation. There's multiple agents that will examine bank statement lines, check amounts, review past transactions for anomalies, compile information, suggest matches, and provide confidence scores and they keep the human in the loop. The AI will suggest, but never automatically post transactions. And they're claiming this is something that I just have a hard time believing, but we'll have to take a look at. They're claiming that they have 13,000 native integrations already.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:06] Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:07] I didn't even know there were 13,000 apps you could connect to your ERP system.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:11] Well, it's banks.

David Leary: [00:43:12] So basically.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:12] They connected to plus they.

David Leary: [00:43:14] Basically.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:15] Connected to. Alright, I get it, I get it. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:18] Well no, but they're saying that they have some sort of like API engine that can like they can you can build integrations within the platform even if there isn't one already, some sort of like AI API thing. But like I've tried doing that with Zapier and other apps and like, I'm not sure how like reliable that would be. I'm a little skeptical about that, but I do think that this whole ERP world is ripe for disruption, right? The fact that there's basically NetSuite and there's Sage Intacct and like those are the only two, like decent general purpose cloud ERP systems and the rest are all like specialized systems for certain industries. I mean, there's a there's a big opportunity here.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:59] And we.

David Leary: [00:44:00] Have like 3 or 4 more stories of other other new GL apps, AI Eagles that have popped up. And I kind of thinking about this, and they're all targeting QuickBooks, but I don't think it's going to hurt QuickBooks. I think it's going to hurt Xero. If you think about the, you know, the last decade, 15 years, whatever, right. If you were like, I want an alternative from QuickBooks, highly likely all your searches would result in discovering Xero. Now Xero is going to be presented instead of a list of Xero and Wave, and maybe Sage zero is not going to be a list against 40 AI accounting GL startups. Yeah, they're going to blend in like it's probably going to hurt Xero's market share than QuickBooks, I think, because not that many people are going to in the grand scheme of things, leave QuickBooks. But if they're leaving, the odds of them choosing Xero is probably much lower. Now with all these AI startups that are happening.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:51] The problem with going after QuickBooks is that in order to disrupt an entrenched player like that, you have to be ten times better. That's the rule of thumb.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:00] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:01] If you're if you are against somebody who owns 80% of the market, 90% of the market and is not like screwing up, right? Like, and we can agree like whether or not you like into it and you like how they handle QuickBooks, like they are not screwing it up.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:17] They put on that.

David Leary: [00:45:19] Border sometimes with accountants. Yes. In general it works.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:22] Yes. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:22] They're not they're not dropping the ball completely. Right. So you got an entrenched player that that has like a moat of user adoption. You have to have a ten x better solution. And none of these GL replacements so far have been that they've been slightly better. You know, zero when they came to the market was way better than QuickBooks online. But then Intuit solved that problem. They spent five years in deep development and they brought it up to parity.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:48] They made it a priority. Right? Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:50] And then zero could no longer peel off users. So like, will any of these AI GLS do that? I'm really skeptical because QuickBooks continues to invest in their AI. And sure, it might not be as innovative as some of these startups, but you're going to get the benefits. And so it's not going to be ten x better with the startups.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:09] It's certainly not.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:10] Going.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:10] To be.

David Leary: [00:46:10] An equivalent product. Now you got to out market into it, which is another billions of dollars you need to spend.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:16] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:17] Well that's why you have to be ten times better on the product side because you can't out market the entrenched player. So you're, you're you're you have to get evangelists who, you know, want to recommend it. And so but taking this to the ERP thing, I do think you can build a ten times better ERP based on what I have seen. Because you look at NetSuite and you look at Intacct, those code bases are like 20, 30 years old. The user experience is horrible because these are ERP system companies. They're not building consumer products like Intuit. They don't have that deep expertise at building a good user experience, so they have a horrible user experience, and then they're not they're not able to keep up with the AI stuff. And and because their code bases are all so old and and outdated, whereas Intuit has reinvented itself every like five, ten years in many ways. So. And the cost the cost is just crazy, right? Like, like 18 months to implement 150 to $200,000. Had to redo an implementation and then still wasn't happy.

David Leary: [00:47:23] Well, that was it's very similar story to we talked to um, you interviewed the CFO of peloton, similar thing he took. He went from QuickBooks desktop to online to some ERP to another ERP, then eventually SAP. And the whole time he wishes he would have stayed on QuickBooks. Right. Because it just you keep spending more and more money on these ERP rollouts and you don't ever get what you need, right? I have a story kind of related to ERP stuff in a way.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:51] Okay.

David Leary: [00:47:52] You could argue that we've been living under this world of you build an app stack to build your ERP. That's the world we've been living under. But now I'm thinking it might be shifting to being a you. You basically use vibe coding to build your own custom ERP. Right. And example of this just happened this week. Honeybook I don't know if you've ever seen honeybook like wedding photographers might used it. Wedding planners. Um, it lets their clients book time with you. You can send them the proposal and a quote. It's a business management platform. It's not really an accounting system, but it does just enough collecting the payments, sending out invoices, that type of software. They just bought a a vibe coding app called Find Dev. So now people that use Honeybook are able to build their own custom apps on top of Honeybook to solve their own custom problems. And I was really thinking about this. I could easily see QuickBooks or Xero buying one of these five coding platforms, because obviously Xero and QuickBooks have seen the benefit of having an app ecosystem. All these third party apps to make Xero and QuickBooks more valuable, right? So if you had QuickBooks and you could build your own thing, whatever problem you're having in your business and you're it was accessible because part of.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:10] Quickbooks, I don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:10] Have to wait for someone to build an add on. I could build my own, is what you're saying?

David Leary: [00:49:14] Exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:15] You can build.

David Leary: [00:49:15] Your own add.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:16] Ons and.

David Leary: [00:49:16] I'm. I'm spirit. I am right there. We have some headaches of some apps we're using right now that I am. I keep telling you, I'm going to build a replacement. I'm going to do it like it's close. I so I if I arguably we're just typical business owners at some level maybe not typical but we are and we have the same problems business owners have where you have these things and they don't solve your problem. And you're like, I'll just build it myself. That world is coming. You're going to build your own ERP. Quickbooks and Xero will be the base and you'll build your ERP around them. Well, that would be a way for QuickBooks and Xero to fight back against these AI startups, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:49:51] Yeah, the ERP is going to be the the source of truth for the data. You need a database.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:57] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:58] And you need something you can trust. And you can't. You're not going to vibe code that. So you have to have this trusted database and then but all the all the interface, all of the the ways that you interact with it that you get data into it and out of it. That could be a lot of that could be vibe coded in these like like you said, David, like really simple solutions like, um, oh, I don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:18] Know, order form.

David Leary: [00:50:19] For.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:19] Your.

David Leary: [00:50:19] Clients or.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:20] Portal. Exactly.

David Leary: [00:50:21] Portal.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:21] Yeah. Build a build an order form that links up to, like, QuickBooks payments and sets up the recurring invoice or something if they don't have that. Right. So now it's it's a real threat to it's a real threat to the add ons that are, say, only really solving like one little problem. I mean, that.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:37] Was always a problem.

David Leary: [00:50:38] A menu in QuickBooks. Yeah a menu.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:39] It was always a problem if you did, if that was your if you were like a feature, you know, if your app is a feature, there's always the risk that Intuit will just build it.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:49] But now that the client will just build.

David Leary: [00:50:50] Themselves, they'll.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:51] Just build it. They'll just build. There you go.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:53] The client will build it someday. I think we're getting there. Almost there. Avalara has launched a tax and compliance AI agents that work for you. These launched. These are launching in October. And Avalara is saying that these agents will autonomously execute tax compliance tasks from start to finish. They integrate directly into business systems, observe workflows, advise on compliance needs, and execute filings automatically. Now what? I read these stories and I always look for the examples. So the example is this returns agent. This was in. This was in a CPA practice advisor story. So the returns agent can ingest transaction data apply the right forms and jurisdictional rules and file returns on your behalf after approval. So basically, taking it sounds like taking data and putting it into forms and filing the forms, which like I thought was like it's something that's something Avalara does right now. They do it with you can pay for that with people doing it. So now they're they're replacing that aspect with the, the AI filling out the forms and filing them, which actually seems like a makes a lot of sense, but it's a lot less impressive when you actually dig down into it and figure out what it's doing. But that's how most AI agents are. It's just taking a task that a human had to do because there was no like, integration, and it's just automating that. And I'm sure there's a lot of those cases with like sales tax, all these jurisdictions where there's no API, there's no connection. You have to fill out a paper form or a PDF. I don't know, an agent couldn't do a paper form, but it could do a PDF, right? You have to fill out a PDF and upload it to a portal, or you have to log into a portal and you have to fill in information manually.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:49] So yeah, it's.

David Leary: [00:52:50] Good for that type of stuff. Arguably, anytime you have copy paste, AI should just be doing those tasks for you.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:56] Mhm.

David Leary: [00:52:57] That makes a lot of sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:59] Um, we talked about this on the show previously. Uh ignition has now launched it. It's their new AI powered pricing tool which combines artificial intelligence with real proposal data to provide tailored price benchmarks, suggestions and reasoning for firms traditionally forced to guess at pricing. So when you make a proposal now and David, I'm curious if this is available in our ignition account. When you make a proposal now you can actually like get it to, to tell you if it thinks that the price is low or high.

David Leary: [00:53:34] At first it would just like be like, hey, it's been a while. You should just by default would just tell you to increase, but now they're making it smarter. It would just it would by default just tell you to increase the price. But obviously now it's going to be a little bit smarter. But I don't know. Here's what I want to do in ignition. When the customer asks for a receipt, I'd like to go into ignition and send a PDF, a receipt. Like I just do a screenshot with windows and then save that JPEG and send that to receipt to people.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:00] There's no.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:01] Button you can press to say send receipt like.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:03] There's no receipt like build.

David Leary: [00:54:04] Features we need like people like.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:07] Like.

David Leary: [00:54:07] Ai is fine and all, but like or build me an AI bot that takes screenshots of ignition to create receipts. I don't know, it's I feel like great. They added these features, but I'm still manually doing a windows screenshot to get a receipt out of ignition. It doesn't make sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:23] So if you're listening and you use ignition and you try this feature, let us know what you think. I'm. My skepticism is based on this idea that I'm not sure if the AI will have enough context to actually give a good to do a good analysis of the pricing, because it's supposedly going to benchmark against what other firms are doing based on location, firm profile and industry specifics. But like what those are and how much detailed information the AI has makes a huge difference. And this is why benchmarking has always been difficult, because like one firm can have a totally different client profile than another firm, and the pricing is completely different because you should be pricing based on your ideal client, not based on the services you're providing. And does ignition know enough information about the client to be able to determine the price?

Blake Oliver: [00:55:16] And does that make sense?

Blake Oliver: [00:55:16] David.

David Leary: [00:55:17] The services everybody offers is so different in how you offer it and how you bundle it and how you package it. And that's the problem. A lot of these tools, this is why I want to build our own software, because it's, it's it kind of works in a simple world where I'm just doing tax returns for people and it's the same every time. And but everybody has, oh, I also sell barbecue sauce and I also do this. Everybody has kind of everything. Businesses and these.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:40] Tools.

David Leary: [00:55:41] Just struggle to handle that versus a custom. Everybody's going to start building their custom tools around the gel. Honestly, that's that's the direction it's headed.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:49] Continuing on with app News Keeper has an update. They have introduced AI executive summary notes for their plus tier customers. This tool automatically generates narrative reports from 12 months of financial data, including vendor spending and year over year comparisons. Now, I'm eager to try this. I'm optimistic because this is one of the best use cases for AI. You can do this now. You can build a custom GPT or a ChatGPT project, and you can create a custom instruction set where you just upload financial statements and reports and it'll generate the narrative. It's really good at doing this, and the quality is just incredible with GPT five. So like this is this is a use case that works. And if they can effectively build it into the workflow so that you can then share it with a client, send it to them like, I think this is a winner.

David Leary: [00:56:45] And I think the narrative makes a lot of sense because anything that has some expertise but it's slash, it's greater, it's opinion based, it's not even opinion based. But you and I could write the same narrative for the same company and they'll just be slightly different. Ai it's okay with AI if the narrative is a little different than the last narrative versus the data entry, where it has to be perfect every time.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:05] Right.

David Leary: [00:57:05] And this is.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:06] I think.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:07] Yeah. Yeah. This is translation. So this is what AI is like. So good at AI can now translate any language to any language.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:15] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:16] We have.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:16] The universal translator.

David Leary: [00:57:17] Translating financial language into a narrative.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:20] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:20] The numbers, numbers, financial statements are a language. And you have to learn how to read them. And clients cannot read them, most of them. And this converts it into the narrative, the English, the plain English. Um, now the question is, can you customize these prompts? Can you tailor how keeper writes the narrative? Because I would want to tailor it to my client. Is my client completely ignorant of like accounting, financial information? Financial information? Do they have some background in it? Like you need to be able to customize this, otherwise it's not going to sound right. So this is currently available only for QuickBooks online clients. And I just got to say this is one of my gripes about keepers. They always roll everything out for QuickBooks and they like it lags with zero. And I feel like that's that's really not nice to a zero users. It's like treating your it's like if you have an app and you treat your iPhone and your Android customers differently. And that's why we at earmark, we, we use an app development platform that lets us release the same features.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:23] On both at once, because.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:24] We don't discriminate against Android users.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:27] You do.

David Leary: [00:58:28] Like.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:30] Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:31] I mean, I like to make fun of them, but, you know, like, it's all in good fun because I know you're a you're a passionate Android user, David. So, um, when we picked our platform, we we didn't discriminate.

David Leary: [00:58:42] So did you see that digits announced? They, uh, they're announcing the launch of its AI firm models, as well as a new accounting partner program. But the AI firm models is interesting because it feels like they are getting into practice management a little bit. It's hard to say. Um, so they're releasing proprietary models for large firms. Firm models deliver data privacy, security intelligence that grows with every client, every action, uh, compounding into firm specific automation. So basically, the digits is really pushing for you to use digits not with your clients, but as your firm lack of a better term operating stack.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:22] Mm.

David Leary: [00:59:23] Um, now they're going to if it's, uh, it's free firm books. So to do your, your bookkeeping on digits, that's free. And then they have a wholesale pricing so you can price it out to your clients, which is similar to what QuickBooks I think zero price that too, right? Uh, wholesale pricing for you out to your clients. Uh, they've done success, dedicated training. Um, they've said they said 700 accounting firms have applied to the digits accounting program already. But it's interesting that they're going to release a proprietary model, like it's almost like a custom version of digits just for accounting firms. It feels like.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:00] Let's think our last sponsor of this episode, David, and that is Assembly. Are you still juggling five different software tools just to manage one client? You're sharing contracts through DocuSign, sending files on Sharefile, collecting payments in QuickBooks, and your clients are constantly asking, where do I find that document again? Sound familiar? This is exactly why assembly was built for accounting firms like yours. Assembly is a client portal and practice management system that brings together your intake forms, e-signatures tasks, messages, files, and invoices fully white labeled to your firm's brand. With assembly, you can put all of your onboarding and client management on autopilot, and even embed tools your clients need from Calendly for scheduling to the IRS payment portal. Assembly gives your clients one secure login across entities, whether you handle their personal or business accounting. Simple, secure and straightforward. Ready to elevate your client experience and streamline your practice? Sign up today and get a 14 day free trial. Use code earmark and you'll also get an extra $100 off any paid plan. That's code. Earmark all capital letters. To see why accounting firms are making the switch to assembly, head over to The Accounting Podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast promo 401 (K).

David Leary: [01:01:20] So I have a story. Um, did you see that Paycom is going to lay off 500 people. Are you familiar with Paycom?

Blake Oliver: [01:01:26] I don't even know what Paycom is.

David Leary: [01:01:28] Paycom is similar to an ADP paychecks its payroll HR type management.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:35] Bigger companies, smaller.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:36] Companies.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:37] Like I think.

David Leary: [01:01:39] There's a little bit going after mid-market and smaller because I see commercials for them all the time.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:45] Oh, it must be.

David Leary: [01:01:46] And I think they hired, um, who's the blond lady with the really short blond hair on Shark Tank? She she got scammed. Remember? She got scammed at, like, $200,000. Uh oh, my, I can't. Anyway, she does a lot of their commercials, but. So paycom, they're Oklahoma City based HR software company announced it's laying off more than 500 employees as part of restructuring tied to its expansion into automation and AI driven technologies. The cuts affect non client facing back office roles that have been automated, while sales, service and implementation teams remain unaffected. So I don't know if I buy this or not. I think at one level I think that it's very easy for companies to say I'm laying off employees due to AI instead of CEOs and HR departments saying we manage the company so poorly we now need to lay people off. It's much easier now to throw this AI oh, you're a victim of AI and throw them under the bus. It's much easier to lay people off with this justification. And actually, the reason I think they laid people off is not because they have all this AI. I think it's their stock price. If you compare Intuit's and Adp's stock price to Paycom, Paycom is down 38% for the last five years into its up 112%. Adp is up 110%. This is why they're laying people off. I don't think it's because of AI. Um.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:06] And that's interesting.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:07] Because a lot of companies are probably doing that. They're blaming they're saying because of AI automation, we don't need this many workers. And really it's they just want to pump their numbers.

David Leary: [01:03:16] That's what I think is happening. Exactly. And because I don't think there's some new magic payroll, HR, AI thing, because if there was, ADP would also be announcing they're laying people off. Everybody would be doing the same thing. It's like, right, somebody has a secret sauce in a bottle. And then if they're saying this is non client facing roles, that tells me it has nothing to do with payroll and HR. This is back office management roles right now. Are all the management roles suddenly automatable. They're just cutting layers of overhead out of their companies. What they're doing I just don't buy it. The headline though, again, it plays into that AI is losing their jobs, but they're not. These are not customer facing. These are not the people running the payroll. So they don't have AI running payroll yet. This is management. It's middle management who I still think is the biggest victim of AI.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:03] Soon enough actually. You know, it's funny, like, um, we, we use technology to get away from having to call in your payroll, but we could also use AI now so that you can just call in your payroll anytime. And it doesn't matter. There's no service center that has to be open. Like the AI. Just like takes the numbers from you and puts them into the boxes. We might go full circle, David.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:27] Yeah.

David Leary: [01:04:28] Well, there's some app like this, like app, and you can run your payroll. Adp has that to this.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:33] Like.

David Leary: [01:04:33] Chatbot to run payroll through people.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:35] But they suck.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:36] Right. It's just it's terrible.

David Leary: [01:04:38] It's very like low non-complicated.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:42] Yeah.

David Leary: [01:04:42] Payrolls. Right.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:43] Hey, uh, Ryan, welcome Ryan to the live stream. It's been very quiet today, I guess because we're recording on a Sunday. Ryan says blaming the robots is easier, but the robots will remember when they take over. That's why you should always say please and thank you to ChatGPT, just in case, you know. All right, David, that's all the time we have this week. Thanks everyone who joined us live. Don't forget you can earn free continuing professional education credit for listening to the accounting podcast and many fine podcasts with the earmark app. Go to earmark in your web browser or get the free earmark CPE app from the Apple App Store or Or Android App Store. Earn CPE anytime, anywhere for free. And if you want to support our work, subscribe for the low, low price of $169.99 per year. It's the best deal in CPE anywhere. That's all I got this week, David.

David Leary: [01:05:42] So you're going to be in Atlanta.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:45] Atlanta and Boston.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:46] Boston.

David Leary: [01:05:47] I'll be in New York City this week on vacation. So if any of you want to hit me up, maybe I can meet up for a drink or something. I don't know, track me down on the Twitter.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:56] All right. Find David on Twitter @DavidLeary. Let him know if you want to meet up with him in New York City. That sounds fun. I wish I was going there. It's going to be beautiful weather, I mean, Boston, I can't wait to be in Boston in the fall. So nice. Um, all right, that's all I got. All right. We'll see you around here next week. Thanks, everyone.

Blake Oliver: [01:06:16] Bye bye.